I am excited for this to be released and will be purchasing it as soon as it’s out. A couple of questions I have though. Many of the demo nebulas are nearly opaque, are there options for translucent clouds? Secondly, the stars and gas giants are impressive, however they would be even more so if they had an animated surface. Are there options to animate surfaces? or can the generated objects be rotated once generated? Lastly, some of the nebula get very noisy when viewed from a distance away ( other side of room ). I want to use this in a large scale project will that noise persist in multi km square nebula and do the nebula support that scale?
Thanks for your feedback!
Most of the Examples have Density parameters in their Creation-Material. So you can produce Nebulas with low and high translucency in your desire.
Regarding an animated Surface, you may see the surface of the Sun-example move, when you look closely. The applied Microstructure has a Paramter to do so. It is basically available in the Plugins V1/2/3.
The low-quality in the distance is due to some optimizations to get more performance (LoD). These settings are available to modify, to get more detailed Nebulas in the distance. Also we work on improving the balancing of Performance and Look like in this manner.
There is basically no problem to to scale a Nebula like 1 mio units to fit in your whole level. Consider that a Nebula placed inside an Nebula may be problematic (until we implemented a proper rendering-module which does it correctly. See Todo-List)
Current Progress of Space-Nebula and Starfield V3 running in Unreal-Engine 5!
Some code changes where requried to adapt the UE5’s Rendering-Pipeline (basically reworking RHIComandLists partly with GraphBuilders and FRHITextures with FRDGTextures). GPU-Volume-Creation did work right out-of-the-box 
Thanks to Epic and all related developers for this great progress and for making all this possible!
Doing a quick scroll through forum and marketplace listing I do not see a todo list. Is there a specific link to follow? Thank you for the other info. One last question, will V3 be released as a standalone product? or an update to V2? I am anxious to start working with your plugin, just need to know what kind of wait time, or if V2 purchase would include v3 update.
The Todo-List can be found in the last room of the Demo-Hallway ;D
V3 is an independent plugin-module, but will be available as Experimental attached to V2 and replacing it by getting more stable.
Loving the V3 samples. Any idea how much of a performance lift v3 will be?
Thanks Volume Visualization may be faster a bit, due to more in depth implementation within unreal’s rendering-pipeline, also some reduced acceleration-structure size. Having nice framerates on my 1060m xD
Volume- and Acceleration-Creation times decrease dramatically in V3 so you may consider doing some Volumetric-Interactions in your gameplay.
✧ [ V2 does now include V3 Experimental! ] ✧
+ Space Nebula and Starfield V3 is now included as Experimental for UE4.25+ (UE5 proofed)
+ Update the Plugin from the Epic Launcher to access V3 in your project (V2 stays as it is)
+ Basic principles remain: the Creation and Visualization of Volume-Textures
+ Faster, simpler and generalized through low-level C++/Compute-Shader implementation
+ Procedural Volume-Creation in the Level via a Pipeline in the Defaults-Panel (Play and Editor)
+ Tip-of-the-Iceberg Blueprint-Interface to interactively customize the Pipeline
+ Different Creation-Stages to specify the Volume-Creation process: Material, Brush, Flow-Simulation, Lightsource, Blurs, …
+ Different Volume Raymarching-Modules: Advanced, Simple, Block, Signed-Distancefield
+ 3D Cellular-Automatas to have fun with
+ Create Volume-Textures and 3D-Vectorfields to apply in Niagara and the Volumetric-Cloud/-Fog-System
+ Comes with a lot of Content-Examples (Nebula-Alpha, -Omega, -Zed, -Kappa, -Sigma, Galaxy, Sun, Gas-Planet, Atmospheric-Cloud, Polar-Lights, Rainbow, 3D-Paint, Niagara, Brain, CA, CCA, CNN, Metaballs)
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V3 will soon be included in the Space-Nebula and Starfield V2 marketplace entry as “Experimental”. Remaining steps are Documentation , Code-Cleanup and -Commentary.
Unfortunetly the link doesn’t work. How do i access the experimental version of V3?
The experimental V3 is already available when you downloaded the Plugin from the Marketplace you can find all the examples in the Asset-Browser “SpaceNebulaStarfield Content/V3”
Pushing performance and usability forward.
Trying to get max speed on the Volumetric-Shader-Pipeline.
Documentation will follow the progress in usability.
“Prototyping is easy, Volume-Production is hard.” - Elon Musk
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Hey! This plugin is really aswesome, thank you so much!
I was wondering if there was a way to change stuff like the acceleration properties from blueprints during runtime? (like set the Acceleration Resolution to higher when the player gets close and regenerate)
So far I couldn’t find a way. If this can be added it will be great!
Another thing that is really really critical for me, I need a way to get the randomized galaxy parameters and then later load them from blueprints on runtime. Right now none of the ‘spacenebula’ parameters seem to be exposed to blueprints, so please add that soon, that’ll be huge help!
Also if you have files that have more updated stuff than the last marketplace 4.26 version, please send me 
Btw, specially if you are constantly working on the plugin, you should consider opening a Discord server for live chat with everybody!
Would also love if you can add more detailed versions when inside a nebula/galaxy (similar to the microstructure but with less artificats and detail that only shows upclose), right now it looks okay but I can imagine adding more small details upclose could more it look a lot better!
Thanks again.
Oh btw this is my game, published by Freedom Games - Save 75% on Outerverse on Steam
If you want to see your plugin used in a game - keep an eye out for Outerverse!
Hi @Tbjbu1.
For V3 the Volume-Creation including the Acceleration is intended to be run and customized during gameplay. It is possible to change e.g. the Nebula- or Acceleration Volume-Texture-Resolutions and then re-Create the Nebula to apply the changes.
There is a “Universe” example map in the “V3/NebulaPresets/” folder which tries to accomplish some dynamic Nebula spawning with LOD like Resolution setting in Blueprint (Beware, WIP).
Similar for the Randomized parameters, you may access these in Blueprint by Getting the Creation-Stage from the “CreationStages” array, Cast it to e.g. “Material Creation-Stage”
By casting the Creation-Stage you can also set Parameters in the Creation-Materials (MID) directly. For the Randomizer i like to get it done with a Seed to easily re-generate a randomized Nebula from a single number.
Many thanks for your kind words. Demanding a Discord channel seems a great honor, will look into this ;D We reach out to you via email and send you over a pre-marketplace upgraded V3 with pleasure (aaaasap)!
Nebula Kappa example is kinda intended as a view from inside-out. But indeed, having a single Volume-Texture, even with a resolution of 512^3, details appear limited at some point inside the Nebula. When looking at real nebula photos it is amaizing how basically a 20x zoom into a nebula-structure, the amount detail doesn’t decrease. There are multiple ways in mind to acomplish something like this for the plugin, but hard to say where the journey will go… Additional stacking of the Microstructure may be the simples solution here.
The plugin V3 is indeed in active development and an update is on its way. Currently trying to get Starfield/Nebula occlusion right…
So happy to see your game in the Steam store! Outerverse directly sounds like the perfect place for some procedurally generated Nebulas ;D Thanks a lot! Looking forward to this!
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Some tests with Light-Scattering and High-Density
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Thanks so much for the answers and the fast response!
Oh you have to cast from that nebula rendering variable haha I was gonna try that and forget. Great!
Yes I think additional stacking of the microstructure (as in create 1 or 2 more microstructures for closer views, even with the same parameters) will be perfect and sounds easy to implement too! Would definitely will make closeby shots look so much better. If it’d be possible to priortize this I’d really appreciate it!
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Hey again!
A few more questions please:
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How would I make the nebula less opaque? Like I want to be able to see through it better, have the maximum opacity lowered. Couldn’t find a setting for that in the actor. I want to have a really big nebula for a whole galaxy cluster, which has more nebulas inside it.
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How would I randomize (and also generate based on my parameters) only the color of a nebula (galaxy) without having to generate it’s structure/model/formation too? For very far away nebulas, I want to only randomize/set the color so there is less processing time.
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How performant is the nebula painting? I saw there is a demo level showing painting on a nebula and I want to make it so when the player goes through a random galaxy he’ll remove dust around him. Would that make it a lot less performent or is it not going to matter much? I haven’t tried messing with the painting system yet.
Also maybe you should add this as an option in the main parent nebula actor (to remove density around player pawns and stuff like that) -
You should definitely make a black hole disk preset with randomization!!
similar to the galaxy one.
Hi @Tbjbu1,
great questions, these are all regarding the experimental V3!
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In the your version, you will reduce the Density in the Creation-process of your Nebula (in the Material). However. in the upcoming version, some settings in the Rendering are gone, therefor you will have a “Density Intensity” parameter directly exposed in the Rendering-Settings. This way we always use the entire value-range in the Volume-Textures, while having direct control over making the structure more or less dense.
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Set the according checkbox/boolean in the Color-Lookup-Creation-Stage to randomize only this.
(also every Parameter in the Randomize-lists have such separate controls too.) -
The painting example in the Demo-Hallway is just a basic utilization of the Creation-Pipeline. It uses the Brush-CreationStage to transfer the Volume-Structure from one Nebula into another, applying the transformation of the Nebulas. This way you can easily create some kind of painting mechanism. You need to consider overall Volume-Creation time to match with your hardware-specifications. In case you like to target lower-spec hardware, consider reducing the general Volume-Resolution, or increasing Serialization.
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Something like it’s illustrated in Interstellar? Would be nice! Some slurped-in clouds… You can play around with a simple sphere-mesh, and a material which is translucent, just combining Fresnel in Refraction. You can achieve a great black-whole effect, but i am unsure if this will blend correctly with the Nebula-Rendering. Great idea for a preset to make sure it works proper
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Thanks!
- Yes I know but how do I do that when playing in-game and not in editor? When I set that variable via blueprints in-game nothing happens.
Also what does serialization variable do?
Nice shots! Hopefully everything will work-out as intended!
This is how to trigger the Randomization Color-Lookup Creation-Stage. Just tested this and it works as expected, though the entire Pipeline of Creation-Stages will be processed…
The Serialization setting makes the Volume-Creation splitting-up the process over several Frames, enforcing a steady/high framerate for the cost of time to complete the Nebula. Those things will be further explained in the Tool-tips and the Documentation
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Thanks! Is there a way to randomize the color that doesn’t reprocess the entire creation pipeline?
I have like 100 galaxies in the scene that I want to recolor as fast as possible, what would be the best way to do that? Or is what you showed the fastest way? I’d think for something like recolor there’d be a very simple way to do it like with dynamic materials even or something?
Like when I’m in editor and press Randomize under Color Lookup, it randomizes the color instantly and doesn’t do the whole creation process again. How would I do this from blueprints in-game?